Meet Sven Hauth, CreativeCOW.net contributing editor

Sven
is a digital artist from Germany, who after getting his degree in
Visual Communications started out as a graphic designer for an
advertising agency. He soon turned his interests to animation and
motion graphics. Sven was the first demo artist for the compositing
system "Cyborg" by 5D Solutions. 3D wise he works with Maya and even
more with Cinema 4D.

He
now has his own freelance business, pixeldoggy.com, does animation,
illustration and design work for a wide variety of clients, and writes
technical articles for German trade magazines.

Articles by Sven Hauth

In this tutorial, Sven Hauth demonstrates creating a more complex character with Cinema 4D XL 6.1 or above, a kind of a rat on two legs. He starts with the modeling process, then creates a bone skeleton and finally animates a simple walkcycle. Basic knowledge of C4D is helpful.

In this tutorial, Sven Hauth will discuss the task of facial animation, and the methods that Cinema offers us to deal with it. Facial animation in this case means that he will primarily talk about animating the mouth - once you can do this, you can apply the same concepts to any other part of the face or whatever you would like to animate. After finishing it, you should be able to make your own characters talk and express emotion.

In the beginning was the idea to get to know Cinema's bone and IK capabilities by making a simple character walk. There is a sculpture of two ping pong playing nuts-and-bolts guys in my bookshelf that I wanted to come alive. Eventually the idea of making one of them walk developed into a 45 sec. ping pong game.